We are excited to announce a new feature that will make it very easy to start visualizing data in Excel tables and CSV files using Power BI. When you go to your OneDrive for Business, or any SharePoint document library, you will be able to select an Excel file that contains tables, or a CSV file, and click on "Open in Power BI" in the command bar.

Clicking this command will open a new tab in your browser and take you to Power BI. A Power BI dataset will be automatically created based on your Excel or CSV file and you can start creating a report to visualize your data. Note that this requires that your data is formatted as tables in Excel.

The dataset created in Power BI will be automatically refreshed when you make changes to the original Excel or CSV file. This means you can continue to make changes to the file in OneDrive or SharePoint, and any associated dataset, reports and dashboards will be automatically updated with the latest data. Refresh happens every hour, but if you want to see changes right away you can start a refresh in Power BI by clicking the ellipses beside the dataset, then clicking the refresh now icon.

The dataset will be added to your group's workspace if the SharePoint site you started from has a group association (like a modern team site). Otherwise, it will be added to your personal workspace. Any user can create a report based on an Excel or CSV file in Power BI for free, but to share the report with others you will need a Power BI Pro license. If the user creating the dataset already has a Power BI Pro license, they will be able to take full advantage of it.

If you are a first time Power BI user, you may find this page helpful for an introduction.

We will be gradually rolling this feature out to customers over the coming weeks and months, and as always listen to your feedback. We will make updates to this post as the feature rollout expands through our release process.